Telling a story through images for Makeup products can be tricky. With other products, it’s easy to show through images how your customers will use your products.

With Makeups, your buyer would want to consider their skin tone, shape of their face, etc… So using one photo to tell a story can be difficult.

Sunnies Face did a great job capturing their buyers attention. If you think about it, the model shot was very simplistic. One-shot photo of the model wearing makeup.

But, the moment you land to their product page, the first thing you’ll notice is the model’s eyebrow, which is exactly what they’re selling.

How to spot it?

If you only have a set of images on a background, it’s likely that you’re not leveraging the power of image storytelling.

You may have plenty of product images on your product listings; however, if you’re not weaving in photos with a story and a brand image, you will compete purely on price and your shipping times. Product images that tell a story can be powerful and help to improve conversions as consumers want to buy into a brand.

You can take contextual photos that showcase the unwritten benefits of using your products. Or, in the case of Sunnies Face, take photos that can easily make your buyers say, “Hey, this will look good in me”.

If you sell women’s clothing, you could create a story on your product page that displays happy, friendly looking women having a good time wearing your clothing, just like Bon Bon Bon does on their website.

You have too many product options

Imagine that you’ve spent hours looking for the right product and that once you find it, the product page is cluttered with other products and unhelpful product descriptions like Uniqlo’s product page, where you end up feeling confused.

As a buyer, you end up feeling confused.

How to spot it?

One of the reasons most ecommerce store owners fall into the trap of cluttering their ecommerce product pages is that they want to show all their products.

This isn’t wrong in itself, but it could hinder your chances of making a sale.

The easiest way to spot a cluttered product page is to see how much white space you’re leaving.

If you’re cramming text and images, leaving little to no white space, you probably have too many options and it’s always better to show fewer items at a time.

How can you fix it?

Make sure that when your customers need to make a decision, they have a clear indication of what each decision means.

Everything, from size charts to colors, to other products or models need to be clearly labeled to avoid confusion and abandoned shopping carts.

Try to restrict the number of products on specific product pages on your store. You can add a slider or a similar method to display your products one at a time.

H&M is a great example for this. If you land on their homepage, their product categories are organized properly.

Leesa, the mattress ecommerce store, offers free returns within the first 100 nights and free shipping.

Both information is clearly visible from the moment you land on the website. And, because they know that the store is not trying to sneak hidden fees, it also helps establish trust making shoppers decide faster.

Your web pages are too slow to load

You’ve been there. You want to buy something and the page simply takes ages to load.

That is enough of a turn off for most shoppers. In fact, it will only take 3 seconds for your potential buyers to decide whether to leave your site or not.

And it should, because we’re living in an era where fast loading speed is one of the most important pieces of a successful ecommerce product page.

For instance, take a look at this audit we did to Nordstrom using PageSpeed Insights to see what we’re talking about. In this case, for instance, it seems they need to reduce the time it takes for their ecommerce product page to load.

How to spot it?

At a glance, a good idea to see how your ecommerce store fares against the competition would be to simply load your store and then load the ones from your competitors side by side.

You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or this tool if you want to add several websites at the time and benchmark your results against your competitors’

How can you fix it?

Once you’ve run the page speed tool of your choice, you’ll see several options. We advise you to optimize the first render and make content visible as soon as possible so your shoppers don’t see a blank website as soon as they land.

Similarly, since most ecommerce product pages are image-heavy, it’s highly important to optimize your images and make them lighter.

Most ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, and Prestashop have plugins you could use to reduce the size of your images.

Your cart and checkout processes are cumbersome

Convenience is one of the reasons why people opt to buy online. Hence, ease of use of your website is one crucial factor affecting your conversions.

Do your clients need to register before making a purchase?

If that’s the case, you probably need to rethink your checkout strategy.

Every time you force a client to make a decision, they might not want, you face an abandoned shopping cart.

Besides, you should aim at making the shopping process less complicated, which calls for a streamlined checkout process.

See, for instance, Sephora’s checkout experience. It took us literally two clicks to buy one of their products.

Go to your ecommerce product page and interact with your store as a shopper would.

How easy it is for you to choose and pay for a product?

This should tell you how easy it is for your customers to buy from your store.

Don’t ask for unnecessary data, and offer the payment options your clients will most likely use.

How can you fix it?

Start by retracing the steps it takes for you to get a product. Too many steps and you might lose a sale; few steps and you might look fishy.

Only ask for the information you need and don’t force your shoppers to give you information they might not feel comfortable sharing. Instead, use design elements to help guide your customers.

After all, you’re an ecommerce, not the FBI. You’re a guide, not a hassle.

In conclusion…

The truth is that your ecommerce product page design can be the difference between a sale and a bounce from your site.

Your ecommerce product page is one of the most important decision points for your customers. It’s only upon looking at your product page that they decide to stay and buy or leave.

In a nutshell, this means that an optimized ecommerce product page is critical to ensure your customers find what they’re looking for and come back for more because if your product page isn’t optimized, chances are you’re simply pouring water into a leaky bucket.